


just a lengthy rogue!cadash headcanon

by Noxly



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Gen, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-08
Updated: 2016-07-08
Packaged: 2018-07-22 07:59:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7426624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Noxly/pseuds/Noxly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Just some thoughts I had around Casteless dwarves and the fade that I felt like jotting down. So I sort of compiled both headcanons into one massive headcanon because two birds one stone.</p><p>This is mostly just a warm up and a big ol' storage thing for my future reference, but feel free to enjoy. ^-^</p><p>**** Please bare in mind that this has references to suicide and violence. Be safe, pals.</p>
            </blockquote>





	just a lengthy rogue!cadash headcanon

From the moment he was born, Cadash was headed for a life of inferiority. Dwarvern babies are small, impossibly small in Dust Town where most mothers die in childbirth as their tiny bodies are too malnourished to withstand the trauma of bringing a child into the world. Nova’s mother met her fate, knowing she would not live to see her son’s first birthday should she survive his birth at all. She was half the weight a dwarvern woman should be. She was pale, liver spotted, with her hair falling out in clumps, wracked with pneumonia and lice and the defects of poverty. 

A group of newly pregnant women had walked hand and hand into the deep roads recently, their paper thin bodies shaking as they clung to each other, some choking and sobbing, too dehydrated to form tears. They knew that if they lived long enough to enter labor, their child may not survive, and they definitely would not. They refused to sacrifice themselves to bring a baby into the casteless.  
Cadash’s mother, she had known them all. 

Kaitnier.

Daernys.

Marriar, had been her friend since childhood.

Raen had lived at her camp in her final days, weaving at her side, becoming comfortable with her enough to giggle as they chatted.  
And Nova. Nova had been her sister. She was far too young. Not that it ever mattered. By now her body would be at the bottom of a ravine, or torn apart in the jaws of a stalker.  
Months passed, and as she felt the ache of labor pass over her body, she began to panic. Not for herself. She had long since learnt to welcome death. But her baby was at least several months premature. She choked, imagining her child, the last of the Cadash name, tiny and mewling as he battled against a world he was ill formed and misshapen for. She did not stop sobbing the entire day it took to birth him, except when she was unconcious for extended periods. She would awake to white hot pain as the remaining flesh stretched over her bones contorted, and women dabbed at her face with a dry cloth. There was no water for cleaning. Water was too precious to be used in such a way. Finally, she was slapped awake to the sound of a mewling baby. His tiny lungs labored and threatened a cry, fruitlessly, and she held him to her chest wishing her body had produced milk to feed him before she slipped into nothingness forever. She ran her gentle fingers through his hair, as dark as the stone, and down over his face that would soon be burnt with the casteless mark just as hers had been. 

“His name is Nova” she murmured, as she felt herself fall into a state of calm, that soon gave way to death.  
The Duster wise women took the child from his mother’s arms and wrapped him in cloths. Cadash was a well respected enough name in Dust Town for him to not be abandoned, but there were few places for the surviving Duster babies to go. 

He was offered to the Carta the moment he cried. Dust Town babies are considered to be able to survive once they cry for the first time. The Carta favored members raised in their ranks from birth, and were quick to survey babies for potential in exchange for coin donated to the group who had raised the child.. He felt the soft cloths the wise women wrapped him in tugged away roughly, as he was placed in calloused hands. He protested as muscled hands prodded his tiny body.

“So small...” Said a foregin voice, feminine in tone, but cold and rough, unlike the Duster women. She tuttered.

“He was born too early, m’lady. He only cried today.”

A sigh followed.

“Listen, old lady. We can put it out of it’s misery, or you can hang on. But there’s-”

“He’s a Cadash, m’lady.”

A pause.

“Nug milk formula is in the cupboard. If I see y’ take more than you’ve been rationed, you’d better fucking pray I don’t find you. We’ll get him when we have the supplies to feed another mouth.”

\---

On his fourth birthday, Nova Cadash’s current guardian, a salt crushing family from the northern end of town, were paid a visit by a group of Carta men. He was puzzled by the hulking shape of the henchmen at the door of their hut, but his surrogate mother was beside herself by the end.

“We came t’ deliver a message from Boss.” He said, his voice gravelly and his eyes wandering, caressing her body, searching the house for valuables as he loomed over her. She clutched a sack of salt to her chest and angled her body away from him. “Your kid won’t make it in on the merit of his Mom's name.”

She gulped, stuttering. “But, sir, he’s just gone four. How’s he to make money but to…?” Her voice trailed off, remembering the carta children begging out on the main streets. There was something different about the ones that made the most money. The ones they valued the highest. They were all… Missing something. Parts that should be there. Mangled ears and legs that formed stumps at their base rather than feet. Staring eyes covered in burn scars. She dropped the sack on the floor and whimpered.

“Oh, sir.” She breathed, covering her mouth. “You don’t expect me to…? Please, sir, don’t make me harm’im! He’s-”

“Money’s money, pal. And unless you want Boss to pay out your little Duster clique for your services, you’d better get ticking.” 

\---

Nova mouthed a rag doll on the dusty floor of the shack as his mother began to wail. He looked up at her with bulbous brown eyes, as her husband ran in to comfort her, asking rapid questions that left him with the same look of horror. In order for him to be sold to the Carta, they had no other choice. He stepped back, taking her hands, looking deeply into her eyes.

“I’ll handle this, hun. Don’t you worry. It’ll all be fine. We’ll get the money our village needs.” He kissed her head gently, watching Nova intently as he stared up at him.  
At midnight, Nova is roused from his sleep with a muffled cry. “Laski?” He murmured sleepily, nestling into his foster father’s arms.

“Shhh, it’s okay little one, it’ll all be over soon.”

Nova felt himself brought out of the hut and into the cold embrace of Orzammar by night. He looked up at the starless ceiling, Laski’s face as white as a sheet in the glow of the village’s fires. He saw Laski’s neck move as he swallowed hard, laying Nova down on the ground behind the house.  
“L-Laski?” Nova mumbled, puzzled by what was going on. 

“Shh. Laski just needs to do something, little one. Something that will make life better for all of us.” Nova heard the glug of a bottle, and saw an unfamiliar vile hover on the corner of his vision. It smelt pungent and made his spine tingle. It looked like the bottles that Carta members carried on their belts when he was told not to follow them. The bottles he was told not to drink from if he found one lying around.

A tear ran down Laski’s cheek.

“Laski? Why are you cry’in, Laski?”

“I don’t want to hurt you, little one. Hold Laski’s hand, put this cloth in your mouth. Please be a good boy and don’t scream.” Nova chewed the cloth in his mouth, confused, a rising panic making his little heart beat faster.

And Laski tipped the assassin's acid into Nova’s eyes.

\---

Nova was successfully sold into the gang, and was put to work with the other begging kids. They formed a fellowship of sorts. The Carta bosses had no involvement with a bunch of disabled children making petty cash for them off charitable higher caste dwarves. They spent their days in the streets collecting coin, before running back to Dust Town to hand in their earnings. They would bed down in a stone hall with mattresses on the floor, and enough food to keep them from falling into starvation the way they would if they were out with the lowliest of the Dusters. The older kids made an effort to help the younger ones, hoisting a toddler with a missing leg on their shoulders when he got too tired to limp, or guiding blind kids like Nova from street to street. In some senses, blind kids were considered lucky. But they were vulnerable to being stolen from. It became normal for Nova’s friends to help him to guard his cash and food, and in turn, Nova would fix their possessions or retrieve items for them on his little legs that he praised every paragon were still in tact. He never heard from the people who cared for him as a baby, but he had been informed that they had been paid for his “services”.

At thirteen, the rush to become more than a beggar began. The Carta needed henchmen and assassins, and although they tended to outsource to Dusters looking to make a bit of cash, the occasional beggar was promoted to their ranks.

Nova was lucky. Being blind since the age of four made his hearing and balance good enough for him to learn simple fighting skills. He was useless in full frontal combat, but he was small and sneaky, perfect to slip behind enemy ranks and place knives in their backs. He was trained in daggers and the bread and butter of being a successful rogue, and at 18 he was put to work with the Carta’s forces.

\---

Years later. On the mission to the Conclave, Nova was safely hidden behind Carta ranks. The plan was for him to use his trademark attack; hide, disappearing nearly into the shadows themselves, then appear to cut down foes from the angles they were least expecting, allowing the Carta warriors to rush in and attack. The Conclave was expected to go off without a hitch. But due to an unfortunate sequence of events, Nova ended up being the only survivor.

But more was yet to come.

The moment he touched the orb, he felt feelings he had not felt in years. Floating, far away, with no concept that his friends had all died, that the beggar kids he had risen from the lowest of the low to esteemed warriors with, even the bosses who had cuffed him over the ears and scowled at him when they found him wandering the streets at night out of bed, were all dead. And later, as he walked over the grounds of the conclave seeing their charred corpses still frozen in the ash encased ground locked in pain and attempting to flee the horror they were trapped in forever, he would feel a guilt he would carry with him forever. 

“All those people…” His friends. Fuck that, his family. He had killed them all. And all he had left of them was their screams and the green light that flooded his vision as he awoke to a cave-like expanse of nothingness.

Was he… Dead? He roused from his slumber, a throbbing in his head and a skull splitting ache that traced its way all the way down his arm. He instinctively tuned his hearing to his surroundings, searching for people, places, or anything that he could use to create a mental picture of his surroundings.  
He was unsure of whether his eyes were open or closed when his head (or was it his eyes?) began to… Glow was the only word he could use to describe the sensation after his eyes had had so many years of disuse. There was a green light that was intensifying as he sat there, before a searing pain coursed through his hand with a sound like lightning that made him gasp as the wan glow flickered on and off. He pushed himself to his feet and moved his painful hand in front of his face. And he could see it. His hand, before his eyes, flickering with a strange green light unknown to him.

Vision, maintained and controlled by the fade. A spiritual gift? A hallucination? A phenomenon of science and the universe itself?

\---

He broke free of the fade and everything was a blur until he got outside. He had been shouted at, shaken, attacked, and shown the thing that he had created. Torn open the sky. He was horrified at himself, and the first moment in which he managed to pick up a dagger he considered slicing the glowing, diseased hand from his body on principal as he crouched on the ice, looking down at his reflection for the first time in twenty years. His face was nothing like he had remembered. The Casteless symbol formed an S shaped curve across his right cheek, preserved in aging scar tissue forever. His eyes were fringed with burn scars where the acid had flicked backwards, forming two long scars like knife marks across his brows. His eyeballs themselves were even more horrible. They were covered with cataracts and mangled flesh, and had gone from their original deep, oakey brown to milky blue. They were glazed over as if he were a ghost. 

His beard, oh, hell... He had never felt so ashamed in his life. A dwarf's beard was meant to be a sign of dignity. It was supposed to be neatly oiled and silky, and braided in the appropriate places. In stead, Nova's was a choppy mess from where he had tried to cut it himself. Coiled. Scraggly. It hung in whisps around his chin and sprouted as low as his neck.

He was... Horrible.

A freak.

"No wonder everyone in Haven hates you."

\---

He woke up in Haven. Again. A little more polished this time, he ran a hand over his chin and found that someone had trimmed his beard and cleaned the dust from his face. His vision was steady now, and as he looked down at his hand, he noticed that it had stopped flashing. He rose to his feet, feeling strange in the nice clothes he wore for the first time in his life. He reached to turn the knob on the door, and was presented with a crowd of people awaiting his arrival.

"They're... Pleased?"


End file.
